Dr M Ali Hamza
The detention of Maduro is not a dusty historical footnote; it is a live wire in the geopolitics of 2026, offering a potent blueprint for aggression. This sets a catastrophic precedent: sovereign borders and the sanctity of a nation’s leadership are negotiable if a great power deems it necessary. Russia’s ongoing justification for its war in Ukraine, operates on this identical premise. If Washington can plot to remove a leader it calls illegitimate or drug mafia, Moscow argues, then why can’t it dismantle a government it labels a threat? The 2026 news cycle makes this analogy impossible to ignore, paralysing Western moral authority in Global South capitals. For Vladimir Putin, it is a gift allowing him to frame his invasion not as an outlier, but as a mere mimicry of established US playbook tactics; just executed more overtly. Trumps proudly speaking the kidnapping of Maduro did not just expose a mistake, it actively reinforced the very doctrine of unilateral intervention that Russia uses to justify its actions in Ukraine today.
The forceful U.S. operations targeting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro including extra-legal capture plots have established a dangerous new global standard. This is not an isolated precedent; it is part of a demonstrable pattern of U.S. aggression now visibly targeting Iran, challenging the very foundation of the international order.
The facts are stark. Following the maximalist “maximum pressure” campaign, which crippled Iran’s economy in a bid to incite popular unrest, the U.S. has aggressively amplified internal Iranian dissent. This is executed by supporting for opposition groups. The goal is transparent: to create conditions of civil strife that weaken the regime from within, mirroring the attempted coercive regime change in Caracas.
This strategy represents a profound challenge to global norms. It moves beyond traditional diplomacy or even sanctions into the realm of hybrid warfare, where sovereign nations are internally destabilized by an external power. The emotional and logical appeal for nations opposing U.S. hegemony, like Russia and China, becomes clear: the international system is not rules-based but might-based. If the U.S. can justify kidnapping a foreign president or fueling riots to topple a government, it legitimizes any powerful state acting unilaterally against its perceived adversaries. The aggression against Iran, therefore, is not merely a bilateral conflict; it is an aggressive assertion that U.S. security interests override the sovereignty of nations, a precedent that destabilizes the world.
The recent diplomatic friction between the United States and Denmark over Greenland’s future is not a minor bilateral dispute, but a revealing tactic of diversion. By publicly floating the idea of purchasing Greenland in 2019 and continuing strategic investment talks, the U.S. creates a controlled, manageable controversy that serves a dual purpose. On the surface, it asserts American hemispheric interests in the Arctic, a region of immense strategic and resource value. However, its deeper function is to redirect global diplomatic attention. While the world focuses on a narrative of U.S. ambition clashing with Danish sovereignty, a clean, sovereign-versus-superpower story, more aggressive and consequential U.S. actions elsewhere face less scrutiny. This “Greenland gambit” provides a smokescreen.
Denmark’s firm, public rejection is essential to this theater. It allows the U.S. to appear checked by a steadfast ally, projecting an image of a system where even small nations can say no. This manufactured drama subtly reinforces a narrative of a rules-based order, even as the U.S. systematically undermines those same rules through extraterritorial kidnappings, hybrid warfare, and unilateral sanctions against nations like Iran and Venezuela. The Greenland discussion is a geopolitical sleight of hand: a loud, symbolic argument over territory that will never change hands, designed to distract from the quiet, real-world erosion of sovereignty that is already underway. It is aggression disguised as awkward diplomacy.
Trump’s persistent campaign to destabilize sovereign states, from orchestrating capture plots against Venezuela’s Maduro to fueling hybrid warfare in Iran, is not a contained strategy. It is a reckless catalyst for global systemic collapse. By repeatedly crossing the red line of sovereignty, Washington is not merely targeting regimes; it is invoking a dangerous and equal reaction from other great powers. This pattern of aggression, presented under the thin veil of democratic promotion, is actively dismantling the very international order it claims to uphold.
The logic is inescapable: if unilateral regime change and internal subversion are legitimized as tools for the West, they become justified tools for all. Russia and China observe these manoeuvres not with alarm, but with a cold calculus of precedent. Moscow’s intervention of Ukraine and Beijing’s increasing engagement in the Asia-Pacific are, in their framing, merely adopting the playbook authored in Washington and London. The emotional resonance for billions in the Global South is a deepening cynicism, seeing not a rules-based order but a law of the jungle where hypocrisy is the only constant.
We are accelerating toward a multipolar war of all against all, where norms are relics and every nation prepares for clandestine intervention or open conflict. The sole responsibility for this descent will lie with the Western allies who are blinded by a crusading exceptionalism, chose to break the system rather than share it. Their short-sighted campaigns in Caracas and Tehran are not securing peace; they are moving the world inescapably toward destruction.
